Due to a carpenters’ strike, an engineer (the narrator)
spends the winter in the small Massachusetts town of Starkfield,
where he comes to learn the tale of Ethan Frome through various
sources. The narrator’s initial impression of Frome, whom he first
encounters at the local post office, is of a silent and unapproachable
man with an impressive build and posture. Frome is disfigured, and
one of his most prominent characteristics is his scarred face,
which was smashed in an accident almost a quarter of a century earlier.

Curious about the details of Frome’s accident and about
Frome’s isolated rural existence, the narrator begins to press some
of Starkfield’s residents for information. Harmon Gow, a local stagecoach driver,
provides a few specifics but fails to understand and convey the
deeper meaning of the story. Mrs. Ned Hale, born Ruth Varnum, the
middle-aged widow with whom the narrator lodges, proves equally
reticent on the subject of Frome.

When the livery stable horses fall ill from a local epidemic,
the narrator is left without a way of getting to and from the train
station each day for his work. Harmon Gow suggests that the narrator speak
with Frome about catching a ride with him. For a week, Frome wordlessly
brings the narrator to and from the station each day, a journey
that takes nearly an hour each way. One day, after the narrator
inadvertently leaves a biochemistry book in Frome’s carriage, the
two men discover their mutual interest in the field, which leads
to a brief interchange on the progress of science. The narrator lends
Frome the book in hopes of prompting further conversation, but his
hopes prove empty.

A few days later, a driving snowstorm blankets the countryside. The
narrator’s usual train is delayed, so Frome decides to drive the narrator
all the way to his place of business. During the ten-mile journey,
they pass Frome’s farm, and Frome speaks hesitatingly to the narrator
about his changed family fortunes. In silence, they push on through
the remainder of the snowstorm, and when they arrive at their destination,
the narrator quickly conducts his business before they set out for
the return journey to Starkfield. At sunset the storm picks up again,
and Frome’s horse has trouble keeping to the road in the dark. After
a couple of miles of unsure progress, Frome is finally able to identify
his gate through the mist and darkness.

The narrator, who has been walking alongside the horse,
finds himself completely exhausted, and he suggests to Frome that
they have come far enough. Frome agrees, implicitly offering to
put him up for the evening. The narrator follows Frome to the barn
to settle the horse for the evening, and the two men proceed to
Frome’s house, a dilapidated building originally constructed in
the shape of an L but from which one wing has been removed. In the
hallway entrance, Frome shakes the snow from his boots as the voice
of a woman drones from within. Frome then opens the inner door to
the house and invites the narrator inside. As he speaks, the woman’s voice
grows still.

Analysis

The narrator’s suspicion that the deeper meaning of Ethan
Frome’s story lies “in the gaps” between scattered details also
guides us as readers. Wharton creates an enormous structural gap
by beginning the novel near the end of its chronological progression,
and the bulk of the novel serves to fill that gap. Because the telling
of the tale commences near the conclusion of the drama’s events,
Wharton is able to lend a tinge of inevitability to the ensuing
narrative. The fact that all of the story’s events have already
happened imbues them with a feeling of finality and fatality, a
sense that, just as the events cannot now be altered, they could
not then be avoided.

The subtle foreshadowing that Wharton deploys throughout
the story may go unnoticed on a first reading, but it plays an instrumental
role in the overall conception of this beautiful, tragic romance
of Puritan New England. The very name of the town, Starkfield, evokes
the bleak mood and rural atmosphere of the story. Images of snow,
ice, and cold dominate the descriptive language of the story, forming
one of the novel’s most important networks of motifs. Paying particularly
close attention to the relationship between the landscape and its
inhabitants, Wharton emphasizes the way geography shapes human lives.
She paints Frome as an “incarnation” of the silent, melancholy,
and frozen countryside. Frome’s cold demeanor is the emotional reflection
of his physical environment.

Although it would be a mistake to identify Ethan
Frome’s narrator as Edith Wharton herself, there is little
evidence from which to shape a profile of the narrator as an individual
wholly separate from Wharton. We may assume the narrator to be male,
since, at the turn of the twentieth century, a woman would be unlikely
to be involved in interstate business travel and even less likely
to interact so casually with virtual strangers in a small-town environment.
Nevertheless, the narrator never reveals his name nor, explicitly,
his gender. By creating an unknown outsider to lead us into the
story, Wharton is able to create further psychological distance
between the reader and the already withdrawn Frome. To see the importance
of this device, one need only imagine how different the story would
be were it presented from the perspective of a local Starkfield
resident.

The narrator’s perspective obtrudes little over the course
of the book. The tone of most of the novel is one of detached omniscience—the
narrator gives us Frome’s story as he (the narrator) has understood
it after having gathered all of the facts. However, in this introductory
section, the narrator asserts the limited nature of his understanding
as he first became acquainted with Frome’s story, and the reader
therefore receives a more subjective impression of Frome and his
surroundings.

From the outset, the narrator found Frome “the most striking” resident
of Starkfield as well as “the ruin of a man.” Frome’s imposing nature
owes in part to his grotesque body and stiff face, which
are the result of the briefly mentioned “smash-up” on which much
of the story’s mystery rests. Frome’s farmhouse is symbolic of his
own dilapidated state. Like its owner, the house has fallen on hard
times and lost its original shape, and the narrator notes that he saw
“in the diminished dwelling the image of [Frome’s] own shrunken
body.”

Although the narrator notes Frome to be reserved and isolated, some
of his interaction with the recluse reveals that Frome may not always
have displayed such lack of passion and spirit. When he speaks briefly
to the narrator about a trip he once took to Florida and about his
former interest in the sciences, we see a hint of Frome as he once
was. Additionally, despite his reticent nature, Frome proves willing
to help the narrator when needed, and his offer to drive the ten
miles up and back to the junction in a heavy snowstorm clearly exceeds
the narrator’s expectations. But just as the narrator prepares to
enter Frome’s house, we, as readers at the mercy of Wharton’s shifts
in perspective, are left behind at the doorstep, left to take the
longer road to understanding, which winds all the way back to the
beginning of Frome’s story.